New Issue: Should omitting the 'new' in a 'dmapped' expression be legal

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24756, "jeremiah-corrado", "Should omitting the 'new' in a 'dmapped' expression be legal", "2024-04-03T21:08:00Z"

Currently, the syntax around dmapped supports two ways of creating a distributed domain from an anonymous Distribution:

var D = {1..n} dmapped new blockDist({1..n});
var D = {1..n} dmapped blockDist({1..n});

The first option accepts a distribution instance on the right of the dmapped. This is more consistent with something like:

var myBlockDist = new blockDist({1..n});
var D = {1..n} dmapped myBlockDist;

The second option is essentially syntactic sugar for the first, where the new is implied.

The fact that the language allows omitting the new could potentially be confusing for a few reasons:

  • this is the only place, other than in a new expression itself, where an initialization expression (like: blockDist({1..n})) is accepted as such
  • in all other contexts blockDist({1..n}) would be treated as a call to a type constructor
    • even more confusing here because: type t = domain(1) dmapped blockDist(...) is the syntax for creating a distributed domain type.